In June 2025, Meta Platforms agreed to acquire a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI for $14.8 billion, a major investment in the artificial intelligence data infrastructure company. The transaction valued Scale AI at approximately $30 billion and marked one of the largest investments in AI infrastructure to date. Scale AI remained a standalone entity, with its founder and CEO Alexandr Wang taking a senior position at Meta, while Jason Droege, the company's chief strategy officer and former Uber executive, assumed the role of CEO.
Scale AI, headquartered in San Francisco, California, began as a data annotation company and evolved into a provider of AI infrastructure and software. Its services include reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), large language model (LLM) evaluation, and enterprise tools for building and deploying AI applications. The company's research arm, the Safety, Evaluation and Alignment Lab, focuses on evaluating and aligning LLMs and co-created the benchmark Humanity's Last Exam. Scale AI also operates an LLM Red Team that conducts human adversarial testing to identify vulnerabilities and safety risks in AI models.
Early History and Growth (2016–2024)
Scale AI was founded in 2016 by Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo through Y Combinator, after the pair had worked together at Quora. Initial investors included Dragoneer Investment Group, Tiger Global Management, and Index Ventures. Guo was fired in 2018. In August 2019, after Peter Thiel's Founders Fund invested $100 million, Scale AI's valuation exceeded $1 billion, granting it unicorn status.
The company contracted with the United States Department of Defense in 2020. In May 2021, Michael Kratsios, former Chief Technology Officer of the United States under the Trump administration, joined as managing director and head of strategy. By July 2021, Scale AI reached a valuation of $7 billion following a financing round led by Greenoaks, Dragoneer, and Tiger Global, driven by increased demand for data labeling across industries.
In January 2022, Scale AI won a $250 million contract to provide American federal agencies access to its tool suite. In February 2022, the company developed its Automated Damage Identification Service in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, analyzing satellite imagery to measure building damage and geotagging reports for humanitarian groups. In November 2022, Time recognized Scale AI on its Best Inventions of 2022 list, and the company opened an office in St. Louis.
Expansion into AI Evaluation and Military Projects
In January 2023, Scale AI laid off 20% of its workforce. In May 2023, it signed a deal with the US Army's XVIII Airborne Corps, becoming the first AI company to deploy its LLM, known as Donovan, on a classified network. In August 2023, Scale AI became OpenAI's preferred partner to fine-tune GPT-3.5, and its services were used to create ChatGPT. That same month, Scale AI's evaluation platform was used at DEF CON, a hacking convention, for its first generative AI red team event.
In December 2023, Scale AI contributed to Meta's Purple Llama initiative, a security framework for developing open generative AI models. In February 2024, the Department of Defense selected Scale AI to test and evaluate its LLMs for military purposes under a one-year contract. In March 2024, Scale reached a valuation of nearly $13 billion after Accel led a funding round. In May 2024, the company raised an additional $1 billion with new investors including Amazon and Meta Platforms, bringing its valuation to $14 billion.
In August 2024, Scale AI signed an agreement with the US AI Safety Institute, controlled by the Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology, to collaborate on research, testing, and evaluation of AI models. In December 2024, a former employee sued Scale AI alleging wage theft and worker misclassification, followed by a similar suit in January 2025. Several contractors also sued in January 2025, alleging psychological harm from exposure to disturbing content.
Recent Developments and Partnerships (2025)
In January 2025, The Conversation reported that Scale AI and Meta had previously collaborated to create and sell Defense Llama, an LLM product with military-style defense purposes. Scale AI also took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post appealing to President Donald Trump to "win the AI war." Later that month, Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety partnered to release Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark test for AI systems. The company assisted in developing the benchmarks EnigmaEval, MultiChallenge, and MASK.
In February 2025, Scale AI agreed to a five-year partnership with the Qatari government to improve government services via AI-based tools, including predictive analytics, automation, and advanced data analytics. The deal was signed at the Web Qatar 2025 Summit. Also in February, the company became a third-party evaluator of AI models for the US AI Safety Institute.
In March 2025, Scale AI reached a multimillion-dollar deal with the Department of Defense to develop the Thunderforge project, a "major step in U.S. military automation." The project aims to use AI to plan and help execute movements of ships, planes, and other assets, speeding up military decisions in peace and wartime. The contract was awarded by the Defense Innovation Unit to Scale AI, Anduril Industries, and Microsoft, and is intended for use with USINDOPACOM and EUCOM.
In April 2025, Scale AI released Scale Evaluation, a platform for testing LLMs against benchmarks to pinpoint weaknesses and flag where additional training data would improve models.
Meta's Investment and Leadership Transition
On June 10, 2025, it was reported that Meta Platforms had agreed to purchase a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI for $14.8 billion. The company remained a standalone, independent entity from Meta. Former CEO Alexandr Wang took a top position inside Meta as part of the deal, and Jason Droege, the company's chief strategy officer and former Uber executive, replaced him as CEO.
The investment reflected Meta's growing reliance on Scale AI's data infrastructure and evaluation services, which had been integral to Meta's AI development efforts. Scale AI's customers in the commercial sector included Google, Microsoft, Meta, General Motors, OpenAI, and Time. The company also worked directly with world governments, including the United States on military-related projects and Qatar on social program efficiency.
Scale Labs and Future Outlook
In March 2026, the company launched Scale Lab, an initiative aimed at advancing AI research and development. The lab's focus areas included improving model evaluation methods and developing new benchmarks for AI systems. As of 2026, Scale AI continued to operate as a key player in the AI infrastructure market, with its valuation and strategic partnerships positioning it for further growth in the rapidly evolving field of Artificial intelligence.
The company's work with OpenAI and Google DeepMind on red team evaluations, combined with its military contracts, highlighted its dual role in both commercial and governmental AI applications. Scale AI's Large language model evaluation tools and RLHF services remained central to its offerings, supporting clients across industries in building and deploying AI systems.